Alzheimer's patient voted, records show

Examples of possible voter fraud stretch from the farmlands of Ohio to the West Coast.

In Highland County, 95-year-old Mildred Meddock registered and voted for the first time in her life despite her advanced Alzheimer's disease.

Examples of possible voter fraud stretch from the farmlands of Ohio to the West Coast.

In Highland County, 95-year-old Mildred Meddock registered and voted for the first time in her life despite her advanced Alzheimer's disease.

Her granddaughters learned of her newfound patriotism when they visited the nursing home where Meddock lives and saw an "I voted today" sticker on her clothing.

Records show that Meddock registered Sept. 26 when two Highland County Board of Elections employees visited the home, Heartland of Hillsboro, about 65 miles south of Columbus. Four other residents also were registered and voted that day.

"I'm hot. I'm livid," said granddaughter Chrystal Brown. "A month ago, she couldn't tell you her name she was so bad, and, depending on what time of day it is, her name is the only thing she can tell you."

The secretary of state's office is investigating, assigning an attorney to the case and giving him subpoena power.

"When you have a captive audience dealing with a disability, there's always a concern about undue influence," Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner told The Dispatch last night.

She said this isn't the first complaint her office has received about the nursing-home group.

Heartland of Ohio operates 48 nursing homes in the state. "The boards of elections do come to our centers regularly," said Kelly Kessler, a Heartland spokesman. "A lot of our patients want to vote and they come with absentee ballots."

Brown has no problem with the outreach effort as long as patients are competent.

"My question is ... which side was she coerced into voting for, or maybe my question is how many impaired elderly people are used and taken advantage of for their vote?" Brown said.

Brunner has similar questions. She called Meddock's unexpected voting "odd."

Other odd voters include at least six people who cast ballots at Veterans Memorial during "Golden Week" -- the overlap between the final week of voter registration and the first week of early voting.

None has any apparent links to Franklin County; four don't seem to have any links to Ohio whatsoever.

And at least one of them has ballots in hand from two different states: Ohio and California.

Their registrations and ballots have been segregated by the Franklin County Board of Elections because mailed confirmations of their registrations were returned by the post office as undeliverable.

On Tuesday, the board sent them another letter asking them to confirm their Ohio residences -- and to warn them about the penalties for committing registration and/or voter fraud.

"The board will have to vote and decide what to do with them," said Matthew Damschroder, deputy county elections director.

Among those under scrutiny for questionable registrations and votes are:

• A man who most recently lived at Rescue Mission in Syracuse, N.Y. He listed his address as 154 E. Long St. Downtown. There's no such address. The 49-year-old man never has registered to vote in New York.

• A 27-year-old man who has lived in Kentucky since 1998 listed his address as 2462 Parsons Ave. That address, if it existed, would fall somewhere below the Rt. 104 overpass near the railroad tracks in a heavily industrialized area of the South Side.

• A 33-year-old native Californian voted in Ohio on Oct. 4 using the address of a German Village house. The current resident of that house and the Californian were roommates at UCLA in the mid-1990s. The California native is registered as a permanent vote-by-mail voter in San Francisco County, meaning that he can vote there as well. He had utilities connected at his new business address in San Francisco on Sept. 1. His MySpace account, last updated in August, lists his address in San Francisco.

None of them could be reached for comment. Their ballots will remain segregated and sealed until the Board of Elections determines where they live.

If necessary, the board can issue subpoenas, as it has in the past when it investigated iffy registrations turned in the by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The group has come under fire again this year in several states.

Critics say these are more examples of a state system fraught with problems. Others say the checks and balances in Ohio catch the cheaters.

But one thing almost everyone agrees upon: "It's a wildfire that has taken on a life of its own," as Damschroder put it.

There is no requirement for states to cross-check their voter-registration rolls with each other, so it's possible that people could come from other states and vote in two or more places.

Some states do share voter rolls. Ohio does not, although Brunner has tried to strike an agreement with neighboring states.

She said she thinks, however, that the problem is "minuscule" and that Ohio's penalties for committing voter fraud act as a strong deterrent.

Damschroder agrees. In a county with nearly 850,000 registered voters, "One (double voter) is not indicative of systematic problems. It's indicative of a system that works," he said, referring to the California man with ballots here and there.

More than 15 percent of Franklin County's registered voters have had mail returned to the elections board as undeliverable this year and have been flagged in the poll books for extra scrutiny.

Nearly 98 percent of that group was tagged because their 60-day notice of an upcoming election was returned as undeliverable. In most cases, the registrants had moved since registering and failed to notify the Board of Elections of their new addresses.

The other 2 percent were flagged because their registration confirmation cards -- sent to all new voters -- went back to the elections board unclaimed.

If those flagged voters show up at the polls on Election Day, they'll need to show identification and might have to cast a provisional ballot.

In Highland County, Meddock's registration sailed through with no questions, until now.

Her granddaughter wonders why, after all these years, the Board of Elections registered her grandmother now. After all, she's lived at the nursing home since 2001, long before Alzheimer's had a firm grip on her.